It seems I find myself apologizing more than I should be at this point. Regardless, here is the situation we find ourselves in.
By my own design, I am going to be working late into the night on my performance piece tomorrow, and as much as I've delayed my posting on this blog, I felt it was necessary to do this, finally, before I could continue my work on my performance.
I encountered Tracie Morris first when I was in Sound Poetry with Matt and Jonah (yes, I was in that class too. I was the quiet one in the back. Shocking.) When I first heard her piece, what's it called, "she's too beautiful"? in that Sound Poetry class, I immediately felt like what she did in that piece was what the essence of Sound Poetry was all about. It was a struggle after that for me to hear any other piece and not feel like it was a letdown after that, because no other piece, to me, truly captured the sounds of words, the power of the sounds of words, and what can happen by experimenting with them. Her work, and the works we looked at in this class, continued in that direction. Of course I am not one who knows much at all about other sound poets, but if they could encompass even a fraction of what Tracie does, then they would be a success.
As for our required reading of Picture Palace by Stephanie Young, it was as enjoyable as the other works we have encountered. Immediately I felt as I read the opening poems that there was plenty of room for emotional reaction, emotional response in the text, as has been the case throughout most of the works we have dealt with in class.
With regard to possible comparisons between other writers we have recently come across, I don't believe there is much of a correlation between her, Mac Low, or Morris. Her work in its pacing, word usage, and rhythm remind me far more of poems from other classmates rather than previous poets we have studied - it is not as concerned with tonal performance, repetition, or syntactical conflict as the other poets we have read, including Stein with those other poets. When I read the poems, they sounded much more immediate, much more visceral with their descriptions, which would be the more effective approach to something called Picture Palace?
Would the prose in the book be considered prose poetry? I would categorize it as such: the sentences are far more measured than standard prose usually is, and though the stanzas are in paragraph form, they feel still very similar to her poems.
And, of course, nothing is better for a story than experience.
